Wash and Dry and Wear

Folks, I am happy to report that we actually have a washer and dryer now. As much as I enjoyed hauling clothes to the laundrymat down the street and laundering my clothes in washers used by all kinds of interesting people, there is something about turning a knob or pushing a button and letting the machine do the work while you do something else in your very own place (like blog) with your now lazy afternoon.

Our washer and dryer are kind of fancy-like. They are made by LG (a company we had never heard of before now, which made us very nervous), and these models were recommended to us by "the fantastic Bob" at the Best Buy in Antioch. He has the same pair at home himself, which we felt was a good vote of confidence. When we researched LG equipment online, it also seemed like you got a lot of extras for the same or less amount of money. That's what reeled me in, even before Bob made his expert suggestion.

Our washer has many settings and combinations of settings to choose from, uses at least 50% less water than a top-loading washer because the clothes get dunked into the water at the bottom of the drum (indeed, if you are sitting in front of the washer watching it work -- not that I would know from experience -- you can hardly see any water at all), it has a water heater inside it that can heat tap water if your hot water heater runs out, it dispenses the soap and fabric softener (which I started using now, but still don't understand what it does) when it knows it's the best time to do so, and it spins at 1200 rpms so that your clothes come out feeling nearly dry. It also has plastic rollers inside the drum to make the clothes move around better.

The dryer can "sensor dry clothes" so that your things never get over-dried, and has lots of different settings, just like the washer does. Most useful to us has been the "ultra low heat" setting which allows us to dry all those clothes we would otherwise be hanging up from door jams around the apartment, afraid of them shrinking in the high-heat dryers of the laundrymat. And the few things we do hang from the doorjams now dry in a few hours instead of the former two days, thanks to the high rpm spin thing!

I am very enamored with these new gadgets, as you can tell, and cannot do a load of laundry without exclaiming, "Les, I really love this washer and dryer!" I think he might be getting a little jealous.

When I was about 12 or 13, my cousin and I were doing some door-to-door evangelising (yeah, yeah, yeah) and when we knocked on the door of one apartment, the young couple insisted that we come in so they could show us their new washer and dryer. At the time, I thought it was really weird that they were so excited about it. Why? Didn't everyone have a washer and dryer in their house? Everyone I knew did. But now, nearly 20 years later, I get it. If you visited my apartment now, I would breathlessly drag you into the laundry area and encourage you to ooooh and aaaahhh over our new washer and dryer, and would probably offer to wash the shirt on your back, just so you could see it in action.

Did I mention that installing a washer and dryer cut my closet size in half, and I still enthuse about them? That's real love, and there's no denying it.